Civilisation was not built to worship wealth, but it has been redesigned to serve it.
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trillionaire
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political theatre
One Nation raised millions for political theatre while a Queensland hospice had to beg for palliative care funding. This is clearly ridiculous but is also hardly an isolated incident of misplaced priorities and dodgy reasoning in sociopolitical systems.
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trust
Authenticity is not destroyed by media so much as converted into an interface problem: a carefully arranged background, a handful of familiar signals, and the strange little theatre by which the network teaches the self how to appear real.
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miracle of persistence
Life is not astonishing simply because it exists. It is astonishing because, against every available opportunity to fall apart, it keeps holding together and this resilience is the kernel core of its persistence.
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dysfunctionally human
Cultivated indifference is the flip-side of social media volatility. Insecurity may be expensive but gullibility is free.
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babble
At precisely the moment technology allowed us to express our own thoughts with unprecedented speed, ease, and fluency, people began switching off from the flood of language-model-mediated self-expression that followed.
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university system: status brokerage
Leadership changes amount to little more than a rearrangement of positions within a system whose underlying incentives remain substantially unchanged.
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populist capture: one nation
A society overwhelmed by complexity eventually stops seeking explanations and starts seeking certainty; that is when political movements such as One Nation cease to be anomalies and become warnings.
The future will not be defined by any single party or leader. It will be defined by the widening gap between the complexity of the systems governing society and the increasingly simplified narratives through which society attempts to understand them
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technique, technology, tesseract
Many of the largest problems now confronting technologically advanced societies are not failures of engineering, they are consequences of its success.
Beliefs persist less because they are true than because they provide the transient continuity of narrative as semantic coherence.
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continuity precedes truth
Disinformation is not the opposite of information, but one of the ways communication organises uncertainty into meaning. Its deeper structure belongs less to politics than to the philosophical problem of how truth, coherence, and identity emerge at all.
Daedelus Kite 